Wiesenthal Center to V-TV: Pull the Plug on Host who says Israel does not "Deserve to Exist"

January 4, 2012

The Simon Wiesenthal Center protested to V-Television, a French language broadcaster in Canada, for allowing the host of its Face à Face program, Stéphane Gendron to use his show as a platform to air what it called, “hateful propaganda canards against the State of Israel.”

According to reports from the media monitoring site, HonestReporting.com, Gendron, who is also the Mayor of the Quebec town of Huntingdon, used the December 27, 2011 show to urge continued support for boycott campaigns against Israel goods and services, because, “Unfortunately, Israel has not yet collapsed,” and that it did not “deserve to exist.”

Earlier, on a November 2nd show, Gendron claimed the Israel was an “apartheid state” that indiscriminately murders Palestinians while bulldozing their properties. Despite protests from Honest Reporting and community activists , the network has not taken action.

In a December 30, 2011 letter to Maxima Remillard, CEO of V-Television, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, wrote that Gendron’s views are “shared by the likes of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran's ruling Mullatocracy and its president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for annihilation of the only true democracy in the Middle East…” Cooper said that “it is dangerously naïve and irresponsible not to believe, that such escalating rhetoric—left unchallenged by V-Television—could impact intergroup relations in Quebec.”

Rabbi Cooper told Remillard that while Gendron has every right to share his views, V-Television is “under no obligation to continue to provide a respectable platform for broadcast into the homes of the people of Quebec.”

“It's time for your station to pull the plug on Mr. Gendron,” Cooper concluded.

As of the middle of this week, Remillard has yet to respond.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).

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